Through the Panama Canal -- Day 3

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Day 3 -- At sea, mostly sunny, mid-80s, windy
Clocks fall back 1 hour

We slept in and didn't bother to order room service. I just ran up to Windjammer to get coffee and a few small things. While I worked out and did laps on Deck 12, Kath got a massage in the spa. It was not the greatest experience. It was a therapeutic massage, so it wasn't just for relaxation. But the massage therapist was very aggressive in her approach. Kath said that it was actually painful at several points. I think she did feel better afterwards, but I'm not sure she enjoyed it as much as some other spa treatments. Additionally, at the end of the session, the therapist was VERY pushy about purchasing spa products, like oils and lotions, to take home. Apparently, this is just a part of an overall strategy in the spa. Every time I walked past the spa entrance (which was a lot because of our stateroom location), someone would ask me if I wanted to come in and book something or if I wanted a free demo chair massage. Eventually, I just stopped acknowledging or answering them, which I don't like because it's rude. But there's a point where I just felt that I'd said "no" enough and I didn't want to have to do it anymore.
For lunch, we went to Cascades (our complimentary restaurant for dinner). At dinner, we just sat with our own party, but for lunch, they put you wherever there's an open spot, so we sat with a few other parties. I'm not much of an extrovert, but it was fine. In fact, I might as well just add this here: we found that almost everybody we met or spoke to on this cruise was very nice and pleasant. We've been on sailings that were full of complainers, and this trip was not like that at all. We enjoyed everybody that we ran into.

So for our actual lunch, I had the lentil soup, which was good, and the shrimp risotto, which was very good. I also had the steak quesadilla, but that was just ok.

Shrimp risotto:

Quesadilla:

After lunch, we decided to head to the pool for the first time. The Solarium was pretty packed, so we went to the outside pool. The reggae band was playing and they were pretty good. We had to "check out" our pool towels. You have to present your room key card before they'll give you a towel. Then you have to return it to the same desk so that they know you didn't steal it, I guess.

In any case, we spent most of the afternoon by the pool. Interestingly, both pools were filled with salt water. We were still moving at full speed, so the water was sloshing around the pools quite a bit. People were definitely having fun in our "wave pool".

After a very relaxing afternoon, we showered up and went to dinner at Cascades. The menu wasn't very appealing to me. However, there are a few items that are on the menu every night and so I decided to go with one of those. I had the Spaghetti Bolognese. This was actually really good. My father-in-law had a couple different times during the sailing and it was consistently very good. Kathryn had the shrimp scampi, which was good, but not great. Dessert was a black forest tart (chocolate cake with cherry filling), which was pretty good. The cake was ok and there was enough filling to make the whole thing moist. The other selection was a coconut layer cake. This was a white cake with white frosting that had some coconut in the frosting. It was pretty terrible.

Scampi

Bolognese

Black Forest tart:

Terrible coconut cake

After dinner, we went to the evening show, which was Scott Record. He did musical parodies/impressions and sketches. Let me say this as nicely as possible. This show was terrible. Abysmal. Loathsome. He should never be on stage again. I did not laugh once. There was a lot of nervous laughter in the audience, and only one guy that I heard who laughed genuinely. His parodies were stupid. His sketches were primarily fart jokes. We left early and not a minute too soon.

After that debacle, we went to the Schooner Bar to hear pianist/singer Olena Glotova. Her set that night was listed as a tribute to Billy Joel and Elton John. Well, that's exactly what we had hoped that we were going to see the previous night in the main theater. So we were really looking forward to Olena. As it turned out, it wasn't exactly what we would've liked. She is very talented, and she did some really good songs from Joel and John. But her versions drastically changed the pacing of the vocals and phrasing, so nobody could sing along. And her slavic accent muddled the lyrics. It was her version of the songs and it was well-done, but it's not what I would call a tribute-type performance. Despite not being what we expected, we enjoyed it and stayed for her whole set.

Once it was done, we got one last ice cream and headed back to the room for the night.